Just like Pound's moment on the Paris metro platform, Blow's meditation on regret is particular enough to become productively evocative. It offers me a set of distortions with which to consider my own regrets symbolically: what if I could do that one thing again but hold this other thing constant?
This isn't a process of getting out of the player's way, in the sense that Clint Hocking and others have proposed. The author remains, like a shade.